Lenten Lessons: Gollum on Sin

(Yes, I know I'm running extra behind this week. Sorry)

This week’s Lenten Lesson is on Sin and comes courtesy of Gollum, who is well acquainted with the subject. 

 

                  Now, Gollum is an interesting case because he isn’t what springs to mind when one thinks of evil. He’s actually, at times, a charming character in his own way, and certainly pitiable. Yet, he is also, when it comes down to it, a character wholly consumed by sin.

It was part of Tolkien’s genius that he was able to show his villains as loathsome, unimpressive creatures compared to his infinitely more interesting and exciting heroic characters (frankly, he’s practically unique in being able to pull this off; in most works of fiction, the villain is the really interesting one). Gollum is a good example of this. He’s dangerous, cunning, and malevolent for sure, but he’s also pathetic, emaciated, and miserable.

Gollum started life as Smeagle; a small, Hobbit-like creature who lived on the banks of the Great River. From the little we learn of his life, he was already a greedy, selfish piece of work, but things really went wrong for him when, one day, his friend Deagle fished the Ring out of the  riverbed. Smeagle, enticed by the beauty of the Ring, demands that Deagle give it to him, and when he refuses, Smeagle kills him for it.

Discovering that the Ring turns him invisible, Smeagle (nicknamed ‘Gollum’ by his relatives for the noise he makes in his throat) uses it to play tricks, spy, and steal. He causes so much trouble in his community that his grandmother (the matriarch) casts him out. Cursing his lot, Gollum goes on his way and eventually seeks refuge under the mountains, where he expects to find ‘great secrets,’ but actually only finds endless night and cold and hunger.  

Gollum serves as a remarkably apt example of the effects of sin on a person. He is driven by the desire for one specific thing (the Ring), which has never brought him any good, and which, deep down, he knows will never make him happy. Yet, when he’s separated from it, he dwells on fantasies on how it might solve all his problems if he could only lay hold of it again: he would keep it safe from Sauron. He would use it to become a new Dark Lord and never be hungry again. He would pay back everyone who had ever ‘wronged’ him.

All these are, from our perspective, obviously lies. The idea that Gollum could hide from Sauron, or that he could even grow powerful enough to challenge him, is laughable. But Gollum can’t help but listen to these ideas, and they pull him back into his evil ways.

Gollum, therefore, lives in a state of perpetual temptation; the Ring calls to him every minute of every day, enticing him with grandiose lies to come back to it. But, of course, neither the Ring nor its master gives a hoot about Gollum; they only see him as a possible tool to reunite them. 

A particularly interesting effect that the Ring has on Gollum is that it inspires him to loathe good things: the sun, the moon, family, good food, friendship, etc. It’s implied that he already had some dislike of some of these things to begin with, which helped the Ring ensnare him, but once he gave himself wholly over to it, they became intolerable to him. Thus he complains that the sun burns him, that his family had mistreated him, and that cooking food ‘ruins it.’ But at the same time, he can’t actually like what the Ring brings him in return; darkness, loneliness, and cold fish. They simply aren’t things that can be liked. He has lost his ability to love things that can be loved, so he has no choice but to prefer the unlovable.  As Gandalf says, he hates the dark, but he hates the light more.

This inability to enjoy the good is a mark of sin. We see it today in men who are so wrapped up in their pornography addictions that they prefer the porn to their actual wives. Or in people who have spent so much time listening to rotten music that they can’t even enjoy good music when they hear it. Spend enough time in the dark, and the light becomes nothing but blinding (slight detour into The Dark Knight Rises there).

Gollum spent hundreds of years alone in the dark with himself, so that when he finally emerged he was a wreck of a creature; emaciated, insane, and amoral. His loathing of goodness was by now such that he couldn’t even bear to touch anything made by the elves.

One more point about how Gollum has been ruined. He now is almost incapable of looking beyond himself and his own desires. Something like generosity, or altruism, or sacrifice would be totally alien to his mind (this is symbolized by the fact that he almost always talks to himself rather than to the other characters directly). He complains about how the sun burns him, or how hungry he is, or how cruelly he has been treated, but he never offers comfort or seriously inquires after the other characters. In short, as far as he’s concerned it’s all about him and his precious self.

But, at the same time, for all the above, it’s repeatedly stressed that he might not be completely without hope. Gandalf describes to Frodo how the murder of Deagle had haunted Gollum’s conscience during his long years alone, and how Gollum had made up a lie to justify himself, which he had repeated until he almost believed it. In the same conversation, Gandalf points out that Gollum was almost pleased to meet Bilbo, after going so long without hearing a friendly voice, and to bring up long-lost memories of sun and grass and family (though Gandalf explains that this only made him angry in the end).

Indeed, Gollum actually does come very close to repenting at one point. Seeing Frodo and Sam asleep together, looking so peaceful, Gollum is briefly struck by the beauty of their friendship and, cautiously, makes the first step towards repenting…when Sam wakes up and kills the moment with a harsh word.

Gollum is fittingly one of the most striking, memorable, and haunting figures of The Lord of the Rings. He repulses us in his treacherous natures, yet also invites our pity because he is so miserable, and because his lot seems so unfair. He teaches us four main things about Sin:

1.     Sin Subsumes Us in an Overwhelming Desire.

Sin is very much the opposite of Piety. Piety is losing ourselves in the desire for Christ, but Sin is losing ourselves in the desire for something else. Gollum loses himself to the Ring, and we lose ourselves to, say, pleasure or power or ‘self-identity.’ The difference is that Christ gives us ourselves back, good as new. Sin takes ourselves and never gives them back.

2.     Sin kills the Desire for Good

In our desire for whatever leads us into sin, we eventually lose our desire for things that are actually desirable, leaving us miserable and angry at everything around us and with no apparent way out.

3.     Sin is Self-Centered

Sin ultimately comes down to choosing ourselves over everything else; it becomes all about what I want, what I need. Now, this may seem to contradict number 1 above, but actually they’re two sides of the same point. By chasing after something to satisfy ourselves, we lose ourselves, because that’s not what we were meant for. “He who would save his life will lose it.”

4.     All Sin is Redeemable

While Gollum tragically is unable to complete his repentance due to a harsh word from Sam, the fact that he came so close, that almost succeeded shows that even he, after his long, long years of misery, still had the chance to be saved. It’s a reminder to us that no matter what we’ve done, God can call us back. It is also a cautionary reminder to be gentle with others, even those who may seem unredeemable, because you never know when you might close the door of Grace that has suddenly been opened to them and might not be opened again.

Four Life Lessons from "The Hobbit"

        As some of you may have heard, the first movie of The Hobbit came out last week (see my review here). In recognition of this momentous occasion, we’re going to look a little closer at the story. Tolkien (as you may remember) was a devout Catholic and always infused his stories with his faith. As you can imagine, you can learn a lot from one of the most brilliant Catholic minds of the twentieth century. For now, however, we shall limit ourselves to the ones that can be found in the first third or so of the book (corresponding roughly with what’s in the movie).

1.     Leave Your Comfort Zone

When we first meet him, Bilbo Baggins is a solidly ‘respectable’ Hobbit. You could know exactly what he was going to say on any subject without bothering to ask him. His concerns were primarily eating, reading his mail, and keeping his lovely hobbit hole nice and clean.

Then, one day, he meets Gandalf the Wizard who is looking for someone to share in an adventure he is putting together with 13 dwarves intent on reclaiming their kingdom of Erebor from the dragon Smaug. Bilbo, at first wants nothing to do with it…until one of the dwarves voices the opinion that he is “more like a grocer than a burglar.” That, coupled with the dwarves song of gold and adventure, makes him determined to go and prove himself.

These days we’re often told that we’re “okay, just the way we are.” Bilbo and I are here to tell you that’s nonsense. Of course you’re not okay just the way you are; if you were, you wouldn’t be telling yourself that! It’s like what Tolkien’s friend Lewis said about the phrase “I’m just as good as you:” it’s one of those things that no one would say if they actually believed it. Do you think any saint, or any great man: Peter, Francis of Assisi, Francis de Sales, Theodore Roosevelt, or John Paul II ever once in their lives said “I like being me; I am comfortable with who I am”? Of course not! They were great precisely because they were always uncomfortable: because they were never satisfied with themselves, they were always seeking to improve.

The fact is, there is always something you need to improve, always boundaries you need to cross. If you’re comfortable with your life, it probably means you’re doing something wrong. God doesn’t want us to be comfortable; He wants us to be Saints. An insular, respectable life is generally not a sign of great sanctity.

I hardly even know where to begin with the awful word ‘respectable.’ Christians should never be respectable! To be respectable means to be in line with the times, to be a thoroughly normal child of the Xth-Century, and God forbid we be that! We ought to be a sign of contradiction to the world; we ought to be obnoxious, non-conformist, and improper. In other words, we should never be a perfectly ordinary person of our times. If we are, it means one of two things: Jesus has come and again and the world has ended, or we’re not living as we should. Trust me, you’d know if it were the former.

At the beginning, Bilbo really is more like a grocer than a burglar. He’s (let’s face it) a pampered, upper-class wimp: much like many of us. But he has the desire to be something more, and it is that desire that sends him running out the door without his pocket handkerchief.

What’s your hobbit hole? What comfortable, easy refuge is keeping you respectable, and what’s the desire that will drive you out of it?

2.     Honor Your Responsibilities

 Bilbo and the dwarves are, at first, not what we might call ‘friends.’ They don’t like each other very much. The dwarves are apt to dismiss Bilbo as useless, and Bilbo is, well, apt to be useless. Yet they are friends, because ‘friends’ is what they have committed to be. They’re comrades; mess-mates. And however they feel about each other, they have responsibilities towards one another.

Thus, when Bilbo escapes the goblin mines without his friends, he makes up his mind that, if he can’t find them outside, it’s his duty to go back in and look for them (“and very miserable he felt about it”). The fact that he probably won’t be able to find them (magic ring or no magic ring), that they might be dead for all he knows, and that they don’t even like him very much anyway doesn’t matter; he committed to them, now he has to fulfill his duty to them.

But then, he stumbles across them in the woods to find that they are discussing the very same thing: going back in to look for Bilbo. And, unlike him, they adamantly don’t want to. They complain to Gandalf that Bilbo’s useless anyway, and that they won’t be able to find him, that he should have kept up, and so on and so forth.

Once again, Bilbo shows us the right thing to do, while the dwarves (who are ostensibly the more experienced and dedicated adventurers) show us what not to do. Bilbo knows his duty and sticks to it, no matter how much he’d prefer to do otherwise. The dwarves, on the other hand, plead changing circumstances to excuse themselves. Duty does not change with circumstances or with feelings; it is constant no matter what, and our only concern should be to do it to the best of our abilities.

3.     Get Creative

  

That isn’t to say, of course, that changing circumstances don’t need to be taken into account. Our duty may remain the same, but our situation does not. So, the effect is something like this; we have two points: the fixed point of our responsibility and the moving point of our situation. In between is the shifting, Cube-like maze of circumstance. So, we have to get creative.

This is my default solution.

Bilbo finds himself alone and lost. His responsibility is to find and (if necessary) rescue his friends and escape the mountain. In addition to the fact that he’s stuck in a labyrinthian cave network with goblins prowling around and no light source, he meets Gollum, who thinks he might like to eat Bilbo. So, Bilbo improvises and when Gollum suggest they have a game of riddles to decide whether he will show Bilbo the exit or having him for dinner, he agrees. The only way to the outside is through Gollum, so Bilbo accepts the situation and tries to find a way to make it work for him. Then, when it looks as though he might lose the game, Bilbo accidentally hits on the solution; to think outside the box and ask a question Gollum couldn’t possibly guess: “What have I got in my pocket?”

                  Now, the clever thing about the pocket question is that the important thing is less to make Gollum guess wrongly (since the only way he could guess correctly is by sheer luck), but to make him try to answer. Once he tries to answer, it shows he accepts the question and thus binds him to his promise. Gollum, less adept at such things than Bilbo, takes the bait and loses (it’s the same principle behind things like roulette and shell-games: the trick isn’t in making the other person lose, it’s in making them play at all). 

                  When circumstances seem overwhelming, sometimes the best thing to do is to get creative and try something completely different. To ‘cheat,’ as it were.

4.     “Vanquished Enemies Should be Spared”

G.K. Chesterton listed this as one of the things no sensible person ever has or ever will question. If you have beaten someone and have a chance to finish him for good, you should always ere on the side of mercy.

After Bilbo has won the riddle game (“pretty fairly”) and, in fleeing the enraged Gollum discovered the power of the Ring, he finds himself in a position where the only way he can escape is to somehow go through or around Gollum. Remembering Gollum’s willingness and intent to murder him, Bilbo considers simply killing him. But his basic decency wins through; it wasn’t a fair fight by any stretch, and besides Gollum was already so miserable and alone that Bilbo couldn’t find it in his heart to kill him.

Bilbo’s mercy, note, was done because he could sympathize with Gollum. He “caught of glimpse” of Gollum’s miserable, lonely life and it made him feel for the poor creature. It is easy, in these days of the internet: of faceless names comprised of odd phrases strung together with random numbers, to lose all sympathy for other people. Whenever we’re tempted to lash out, to make crass, hateful comments, or to attack people who disagree with us, we should pause and try to imagine what their life, their mind, their world is like. In short, we should show pity to those we meet.

                  Much later, at the beginning of The Fellowship of the Ring, Frodo (seeing the tremendous damage Gollum has done in the mean time) wishes that Bilbo had killed him when he had the chance, earning him a rebuke from Gandalf:

                  “Pity? It was pity that stayed Bilbo’s hand! Pity and mercy: not to strike without need…I daresay he does deserve [death]! Many that live deserve death, and some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment, fearing for your own safety.”

                  All too often we find ourselves far too eager to pass judgment, to ‘strike without need,’ to take what seems to be the easiest, safest way out, regardless of how it affects others. At such times we should remember Bilbo and the pity he showed an enemy that he had every reason to despise.

Tune in next year for part two: Never Laugh at Live Dragons!

                 

Vive Christus Rex!

Famous Catholic Friday: J.R.R. Tolkien

Fridays are Famous Catholics Day!

Every Friday I’m going to do a profile of a famous Catholic to provide a sample of the vast diversity that is found in the Universal Church.

To kick things off, we have one Catholic that every nerd knows about; Prof. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings.

Here seen shortly after his marriage looking dashing in his army uniform

Catholic Credentials: Raised by a priest from the age of 12; lifelong devout Catholic; devoted husband and father of four children; author of the greatest work of Catholic literature of the 20^th century.

Nerd Credentials: Polyglot and first-rate scholar of Philology and Medieval Literature; champion of fairy tales and monsters; made up his own languages and a mythology to match; author of The Lord of the Rings; creator of the modern fantasy novel.  

‘Ronald’ (as he preferred to be called) was born in 1892 in Bloemfontein, South Africa to English parents. His only souvenir from Africa was arachnophobia brought on by a large spider. When he was three, his father died, necessitating him, his mother, and his younger brother to remain in England (where they were visiting family) without any income. Not long afterwards, his mother converted to Catholicism, earning her the ire of her Baptist family and removing the last financial assistance they had. She died shortly thereafter, when Ronald was twelve, leaving the two boys in the care of Father Francis Morgan.

The two boys would rise early every morning and toddle along to help Fr. Morgan say Mass before going off to school. Ronald had proved himself a bright pupil early on (he could read and write fluently at age four) and soon excelled at studying languages.

As he grew into young adulthood, however, his studies encountered an unexpected distraction in the form of a raven-haired fellow boarder at the lodging house where he lived named Edith Bratt. By Ronald’s seventeenth year, the two were in love, despite the fact that she was a Protestant.

Fr. Morgan was not impressed. Angry that Ronald was falling behind in his studies and worried about his romancing a Protestant girl, he forbade Ronald to see her until his twenty-first birthday. After a few attempts to find a loophole (e.g. by wandering around town for hours until he ‘happened’ to run into her), Ronald settled down and obeyed the order, diligently working to complete his studies under his guardian’s watchful eye. Midnight on his twenty-first birthday, however, Ronald wrote to Edith asking her to marry him.

A few days later, he got his reply: she was engaged to another man.

After Ronald had (presumably) finished wailing in despair, he discovered that things weren’t quite as bleak as they appeared. Edith had admitted that she had only agreed to marry the other guy because she had thought Ronald had forgotten about her, and it was more a match of prudence than of love. They agreed to meet and, after talking it over, renewed their love. Edith gave back her fiancé’s ring, converted to Catholicism (though a little more hastily than she would have liked, at Ronald’s insistence), and the two were married at long last.

Unfortunately, their honeymoon had to be cut short. By the time they were married it was 1916, and Europe was at war. Ronald had resisted pressure to enlist straight away in 1914 (as so many of England’s youth did), opting instead to finish his studies before entering a junior officer program. In June 1916, just two months after his wedding, Ronald shipped out for the killing fields of France, arriving just in time for the Battle of the Somme.

For those who are unfamiliar with the First World War, let me describe it this way; if you took every battle in every war ever fought and tried to make a list of the top ten worst, bloodiest, most nightmarishly horrific battles of all time, the Somme Offensive would be somewhere near the top of the list. 

The battle (which lasted for almost five months) was a nightmare for all involved, junior signal officer Ronald Tolkien no less than anyone else. At the same time, however, Tolkien was always grateful for one aspect of the battle; it taught him a profound respect for the ‘Tommys:’ the enlisted soldier whom, in Ronald’s own words, “was far braver and more noble than I was.” As with many other officers, Tolkien learned to disdain the divisions of class and to revere the common man.

Before the end of the battle, Ronald came down with trench fever, causing him to be shipped back to England to recover. All but one of his closest school friends, however, would never return to England at all.

Ronald spent the rest of the war alternating between guard duty and sick leave, but during his down time he began to write stories; stories based on languages he had developed. You see, Tolkien was a firm believer in the power of languages, and their inseparable connection with culture and folklore. So, having come up with languages, he naturally needed to create a culture for them to exist in.

Meanwhile, the war ended and the impoverished young scholar with his growing family first got a job working on the Oxford English Dictionary, then took a teaching job at the University of Leeds before finally settling down as Professor of Philology (the study of languages, for those who don’t know) at Oxford, a position he held for the rest of his life.

In the course of his scholarly work, he translated Medieval works such as Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight into English and convinced the rest of the academic world to take the former seriously for the first time. He also championed the serious study and reading of ‘Fairy Stories,’ wrote on the power and meaning of the storytelling instinct, and helped convert his atheist friend C.S. Lewis to Christianity (though, to his disappointment, Lewis stopped just short of Catholicism).

Oh, and when he was 45 years old he also pounded out a little children’s book that you may have heard of; name of The Hobbit. Then, when his publisher asked for a sequel, he spent the next decade or so composing the greatest literary work of the twentieth century: The Lord of the Rings.

Having achieved a work of artistic genius, sparked a literary revolution (which he was not entirely happy about), and made major contributions to the fields of Philology and Medieval Literature, Tolkien pretty much continued as he ever had; teaching his classes (until he retired in 1959), attending meeting of “The Inklings:” a small society of authors who met at a local pub to share their works and views, raised his family, and set to work compiling his many, many other writings about Middle-Earth into what eventually became The Silmarillion.

 His works and his life reflect his devout Catholic faith. His writings are laced through with Christian philosophy and beliefs: the parasitic nature of evil and the primacy of good, the dangers of pride and greed and the greatness of humility and love, the need for mercy and repentance, the imperfectability of mankind. In life he was a frequent communicant and was especially devoted to the Blessed Virgin (Galadriel, and Gimli’s love for her, was intended as an image of Marian piety). Of course, as a philologist and lover of languages, he didn’t much care for the changes of Vatican II and would continue to loudly use the Latin responses at Mass for the rest of his life.

In 1971, Tolkien’s beloved wife Edith died; a blow that he never recovered from. Twenty-one sad months later, Ronald joined her. On their tombstone, under their respective names are inscribed “Beren” and “Luthien:” the subjects of Tolkien’s romantic masterpiece, The Lay of Lethian, which tells of how Luthien, the most beautiful of all living things, forsook her immortality to marry the mortal, Beren.

Tolkien teaches us that we can and ought to imbue everything we create with our faith, and that we can love the things we are suited to love while still finding God in them.

Vive Christus Rex!